Immortality

Of Religion, Healthcare, & The Holy Grail

I. Introduction

We don’t burn witches anymore. But we do lock people away in cages for non-violent drug offenses. Like those women who were immolated at the stake, polite society just writes these folks off as bad people.

We pretend that drug laws bolster public safety. But who can believe it? Substances that ravage the body, like sugar and alcohol, remain perfectly legal. Meanwhile harmless Dimethyltryptamine—or DMT—remains listed as a Schedule 1 narcotic in America, punishable by the harshest legal consequences. DMT, of course, is an endogenous compound; our brains produce it naturally. That means you’re guilty of felony possession as you read this. The absurdity of these laws would be downright comical if people’s lives weren’t being flung away by them.

The destruction of witches and non-violent drug offenders isn’t about our safety at all. These are harvests of the innocent that preserve structures of power. Those unfortunate souls are casualties in an ancient power struggle that spans all of human history. It’s an untold story that involves state power, secret societies, and the Holy Grail.

II. Witches

After the invention of the printing press, most people assume the Bible was the first book to be copied at massive scale. But it wasn’t. That distinction belongs to the Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of Witches”. It was a ghastly manual for identifying, interrogating, and convicting witches.

That blood-soaked document contains accounts of witches roasting and eating their own babies. It recommends grisly torture techniques—like the driving of screws through living flesh—to extract confessions. Tens of thousands of women died of agonies specified by this book.

The late Middle Ages was a terrifying time to be alive. In the Fall of 1347, the plague arrived and wiped out a third of the European population in a few short years. Because it was their job to provide last rites, the clergy were disproportionately exposed to the sick. Priests died in even greater numbers than regular folks.

For centuries, the Roman Church charged people for sin forgiveness. They claimed special authority from God to do this, and they monetized that monopoly to great profit. But the coming of the Black Death exposed the Church and showed all of Europe that the Pope had no inside connection to God after all.

The death of every third person was an impossible tragedy to endure. But the loss of the authority that anchored people to a common reality was even more disturbing. Reality collapsed in on the people of Europe. They were set adrift, with no idea what to believe in. As panic gripped the populace, the exposed Roman Church lashed out like a wounded beast. In a desperate bid to restore political and economic order, it clamped down on heresy and burned tens of thousands of women alive as witches.

III. Mystery Cults

The burning of witches was so widespread that it’s come to define the late Middle Ages. But few realize this method of asserting political control is much older than the Church of Rome. In fact, it’s even older than Christianity itself.

In the days before Christianity, the beating heart of Greco-Roman paganism was a place called Eleusis. Located just a few miles outside Athens, everyone who was anyone in Greco-Roman society—from Plato to Julius Caesar—made their pilgrimage to Eleusis. There, they drank a mysterious beverage called a kykeon and afterward declared themselves “saved”.

For centuries the contents of this kykeon was a closely guarded secret; the ritual was reserved only for the upper class. But then democracy dawned in Greece. As notions of political equality took root, the mystical kykeon itself was democratized. A new cult for common folks sprang up around Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and intoxication. Unsurprisingly, intoxication-based religion proved to be wildly popular.

When Dionysus and his cult crossed the Adriatic Sea into Italy, the Romans there called him Bacchus. And the Roman authorities were disturbed by the sudden popularity of a new religion they didn’t have any control over. In those days, before the separation of church and state, spiritual competitors were also political competitors.

So the Senate made a show of bringing the High Priestess of the Cult of Bacchus up on charges. Her name was Paculla Annia. In the ensuing crackdown, the Roman historian Livy reports that 6,000 cultists were put to the death. This persecution took place in 186 B.C.—two hundred years before the birth of Christ.

A thousand years later, the Roman Church copied the Roman Senate. In the aftermath of the Black Death, they dusted off the same political playbook and tried to preserve political control by burning witches alive.

IV. Drugs

The raging popularity of these intoxication cults was due to the fact that ancient Greek wine was a delivery system for secondary ingredients. We’re not just talking about booze here.

At the height of the Roman Empire, a Greek named Dioscorides painstakingly listed the medicinal effects of each known herb and fungus. It took up five volumes. He slapped the name De materia medica on it, and the resulting “pharmacopoeia” was considered definitive all the way up until the time of the Renaissance. What interests us is that Dioscorides devoted his ENTIRE fifth volume to wine combined with other, groovy ingredients like the hallucinogenic mandrake root. The ancient Greeks didn’t drink their wine straight-up. Dioscorides shows us that they regarded it as a mixer for potions of eyebrow-raising potency. These potions—not the contents of the Franzia box in your fridge— is what our friend Dionysus was the god of. His drugs were what made him the most popular god in pre-Christian society.

For thousands of years, the specific ingredients in the wine of Dionysus and in the kykeon of Eleusis were enduring mysteries. But all that has changed recently. The most explosive part of Brian Muraresku’s 2020 book, The Immortality Key, is remarkable new evidence from the burgeoning field of archaeobotany. At a site in Spain, where Greek settlers performed copycat Eleusinian mystery rites, teeth from a human jawbone and a ceremonial chalice both independently tested positive for ergot.

Ergot is a fungus that grows on cereal grains. It’s similar to a magic mushroom. In the 1930s, the wildly hallucinogenic ergot is the very same fungus that the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD from. Accidental ergot ingestion is also believed to have been behind the bizarre events that caused the Salem Witch Trials. The burning of witches and the modern war on drugs are inextricably linked in history.

V. The Feminine Trinity

Unlike the friendlier magic mushrooms available today, ergot is highly toxic. The secret of Eleusis was the knowledge of how to mix up an ergot potion that brings on beatific visions without killing the drinker. For a thousand years, this ancient piece of biotechnology was handed down as folk knowledge through generations of Eleusinian priestesses. Eventually, the secret was liberated and integrated into the intoxication cult of Dionysus.

The broad theme of the Eleusinian religion was death-and-rebirth. A feminine trinity of gods were worshipped there. There was Persephone, the virginal young girl kidnapped and raped by the dark god of the underworld. There was her grieving mother, the grain goddess Demeter, who searched for her in vain. And finally, there was the old woman Hecate—goddess of witchcraft—who helped the mother rescue her lost little girl. But because Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds in hell, she was doomed to return there for three months out of every calendar year, guided by the torch-bearing Hecate. During this time, Demeter forgets to make the crops grow. It was a death-and-rebirth myth about agriculture and the annual cycle of the seasons. And it was a feminine myth. The proceedings at Eleusis were run by women. The three phases of a woman’s life were celebrated by the invocation of The Virgin, The Mother, and The Crone.

At the hands of these priestesses, pilgrims who visited Eleusis experienced a chemical death-and-rebirth of their own. Out of ceremonial chalices, they drank a beer-like substance laced with psychoactive ergot. This was the kykeon. And it was a fitting tribute to the goddess of cereal grains. People claimed to have been “saved” from death after their experience at Eleusis, matching the experience of ego death reported by modern users of psychedelics. It was even whispered that initiates at Eleusis achieved immortality.

VI. Crackdown

In 337 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine accepted baptism into the Church of Christ. Later, under the Emperor Theodosius, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. These Christian Emperors consolidated political power by wiping away all traces of the old pagan religion. The Library of Alexandria, the Oracle at Delphi, and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient World) were all casualties in the war. The temple complex at Eleusis also met the same fate. It was razed by Alaric the Visigoth, a Christian who went on to sack Rome itself later in his infamous career. The Roman authorities wiped away the pagan past to destroy spiritual competitors—who were also political competitors—to the new Church of Rome. Just as they did 186 B.C. during the persecution of the Bacchic cult, they used violence to enforce a spiritual monopoly.

During this time, a tedious series of synods and councils hashed out the minute details of a male trinity. But the Church fathers had a serious problem with the female trinity from Eleusis. Although virginity and motherhood are hilariously incompatible, the two archetypes of The Virgin and The Mother were compressed into the single person of Mary we recognize today. It was The Crone who gave them trouble.

The issue with The Crone was that the newly-minted Roman Church was selling a version of reality in which they were the sole gatekeepers of access to God. Their political power—and eventually their business model—depended on people NOT finding God on their own by eating psychoactive plants, as Eleusinian pilgrims did for a thousand years. The wise old woman who, like Dioscorides, knows about all the plants and fungi in the forest was a threat to their monopoly. She was the Church’s competition. So she had to be demonized. She became the eater of children and the terrifying consort of the devil himself. The Crone was excommunicated, leaving us with only two-thirds of the original feminine trinity of Eleusis.

Just as the Roman Senate once did, the Roman Church aroused suspicion of its spiritual competitors by making them out to be frightening and evil. That’s how it set itself up with a monopoly on access to the divine. And during the Middle Ages it brazenly set up a toll booth on that route of access. This monopoly stood until the Black Death came along and exposed its fraudulence.

VII. Alternative Medicine

Like the incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders, the demonization of alternative medicine is also a modern version of witch burning. That’s because the availability of folk remedies diminishes the profitability of pharmaceutical patents. Thousands of years after the baptism of Constantine, The Crone remains a threat to established structures of power.

In 1987, for example, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner ruled that the American Medical Association engaged in an unlawful conspiracy in restraint of trade “to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession”. The U.S. Court of Appeals later upheld the judgment.

All mainstream medicine isn’t fraudulent. Nor is all alternative medicine effective. But chiropractic is clearly effective enough to threaten establishment power. Otherwise, there’d be no need for the largest organization of physicians in the country to conspire to suppress it.

Priests and doctors didn’t become separate professions until the Middle Ages. Up until then, the people looked to the clergy for their healthcare. That’s why the utter failure of the Church during the plague rocked Medieval Europe to its core. For most of history, there was no distinction made between physical well-being and spiritual well-being. That overlooked fact links the burning of witches to the conspiracy against chiropractic. These, along with the drug war, are all fronts in the same ancient conflict.

VIII. The Holy Grail

Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery thriller The Da Vinci Code suggested that the Holy Grail is an allegory. In that book, the mystical chalice is a symbol for the physical person of Mary Magdalene, who was pregnant with the child of Jesus at the time of crucifixion. The notion is that her body—and not some cup—was the vessel that held the blood of Christ.

The main idea behind The Da Vinci Code is that the existence of Mary Magdalene was a political threat to Christian Emperors like Constantine and Theodosius. They didn’t want the descendants of Jesus turning up and challenging them for control of the newly-minted Roman Church. So they downgraded Mary’s status from honored wife of Jesus to mere harlot. Her gospel was stricken from the canon.

To escape persecution from the Roman government, Mary’s supporters were forced underground into secret societies. They used the symbol of a magic cup as a clandestine reference to the bloodline of Christ. One that flew under the radar of the authorities and endured into the Middle Ages among secret societies like the Knights Templar.

Those are the main ideas in The Da Vinci Code. But Dan Brown only circled around the explosive truth. He never hit paydirt.

IX. The Sacred Feminine

The Holy Grail is a symbol of the greatest secret in human history. This secret is so corrosive of political power that the authorities in every era stamp it out like a venomous snake.

The best way to understand this secret is to consider a piece of music like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. If you search for it in your favored music app, you’ll get hundreds of results. No two of these performances are the same. But there are not hundreds of Beethoven’s 9th Symphonies. There is only one.

Similarly, each of our lives is an iteration of a pattern. We’re sitting in a concert hall, stuck in time with the rest of the audience, hearing each note as it’s played. The knowledge that we only get to attend one concert makes us fear the end of the performance. But the sheet music is the antidote to that fear. It is the pattern, unbound from time, that endures after the final curtain call. Individual performances must always come to an end. But Beethoven’s 9th Symphony itself is immortal.

The greatest secret in history is this: our apparent individuality is an illusion created by the way we perceive time. Because women undergo childbirth, in which a physical person forks into two physical persons, that insight is traditionally characterized as feminine. That’s what the Sacred Feminine really means.

The politically powerful are terrified of this insight. Our terror of the end of the performance is a cudgel which they wield to control us. But their power evaporates when we glance down at the sheet music and wake up to the broader pattern. That’s why the authorities are eternally at war with the Sacred Feminine.

X. The Crucifixion

The tale of the crucifixion, then, is actually a story about a fundamental shift in perspective. Identifying as an individual instance of a pattern invites the cold, clammy horror of mortality. But the moment we flip our perspective and identify as the pattern itself, we achieve immortality. Jesus had no doubt that he was really the pattern, and not just an instance. He was confident that he was the symphony itself, not just a single performance of it. So he willingly allowed the imperial government to end his individual existence in a grisly public spectacle.

His demonstration caused a massive headache for the Emperors of Rome. Christians emulated their master and gleefully allowed themselves to be fed to lions in the Colosseum. Like scratching poison ivy, violent repression only spread the word and fueled rapid expansion of the new religion. The Roman Emperors re-established control by joining it and taking it over from the inside. They scrubbed the secret of the Sacred Feminine from it, and redefined the afterlife as something experienced on an individual basis. The Roman Church was born. But whispers of a magical artifact related to immortality, femininity, and the crucifixion persisted despite their best efforts.

XI. Democracy

The basic idea behind democracy is that giving affected persons a vote in decision-making processes cancels out the short-sighted influence of individual ego. By diffusing power—instead of concentrating it among the one or the few—we can make decisions as a species rather than as individuals. Democracy is decision-making with reference to the pattern—or the sheet music—rather than to any single performance of it.

It’s no coincidence that democracy started in Athens in 508 B.C. The same people who invented democracy ritualistically dissolved their egos just down the road at Eleusis.

Over the long-haul of history, the notion of democracy has gradually taken hold. Very generally speaking, we lead more democratic lives than the denizens of Imperial Rome or of the Middle Ages. Every step of the way, the advent of democracy has been opposed by the powerful few. Predictably, they are loathe to give up their concentrated power and see it shared with the rest of us. They’ve conjured up terrifying devils and resorted to gruesome violence.

XII. Conclusion

Although they were financed by the corrupt sales of sin forgiveness, the great cathedrals of Europe are beautiful demonstrations of the point of this essay. They took hundreds of years to complete. The people who drew up the plans and laid the foundations knew they would never live to see the final product. They’re manifestations of multi-generational strategies; no single performance of the symphony of humankind could have raised them. Those cathedrals are nothing less than sculptures in the medium of time.

The main preoccupation of System Failure is that human society is entering a time of great dysfunction, comparable to the Fall of Rome or the Black Death. But hope is to be found in the pages of history.

The political repressions of the cult of Dionysus, of Christianity, of witches, of alternative medicine, and of psychedelic drugs are all battles in this ancient war. The politically powerful wish to keep us imprisoned in our delusions of individuality. But despite their best efforts, democracy has gradually taken hold over the centuries.

We are not individual performances of the great symphony of humankind. We are actually the immortal sheet music.